FlavourCollider Visualizes Your Brain’s Reaction to Cocktails

Flavourcollider

A synesthetic drinking installation aims to broaden minds after just one sip of a cocktail, as the experience of taste is translated into individual artworks through the brain.

[partner id=”wireduk”]Marcos Lutyens is a multimedia artist interested in the neurological condition of synesthesia, which causes subjects to experience mixed sensory reactions to situations that would normally just stimulate one sense — for example, being able to smell or hear color. He’s working alongside Absolut Vodka to bring cocktail drinkers a visual representation of how their brains are enjoying their drinks as part of next month’s FutureEverything festival in Manchester, England.

It may sound like a bit of a party trick, but there’s a lot of hard science and mathematical theory behind the FlavourCollider installation. Roy Williams’ Xmorphia, a mathematical system that generates forms that mimic the building blocks of life, forms the basis for the algorithm that translates the drinkers’ brainwaves into art.

Explaining his role in the work to Wired.co.uk, Lutyens says, “I’m more like a kind of orchestra conductor. It’s very multidisciplinary, as we’re mixing brain waves with taste with visuals, and bringing them together is where my work sits. What I do like about the visuals is that they emerge mostly out of these algorithms, these equations which allow signals from our brain to create self-generative art.”

Lutyens likes to be “as transparent and uninterruptive as possible” during the process, in which participants wear a Neurosky MindWave headset while drinking a particularly flavorsome cocktail. Their brain activity is picked up in EEG signals by the headset and are then translated into real-time visuals on large flatscreen monitors around the bar.

“It’s going to be a relatively quick process,” says Lutyens, “but it will allow people to watch how their subconscious minds react to taste.”

The images produced have been created through collaboration between Lutyens’ research and the efforts of the “Xname” coding team led by Claude Heiland-Allen. Lutyens studied people’s reactions to cocktails created by Absolut supertaster Bex Almqvist. Participants were asked to discern the shape, texture, form, movement and color through their taste buds.

There was a surprising amount of correlation between the reactions. For example, feelings of movement when tasting one cocktail included “whirlpool, underwater, downwards and a rock rolling gently down a slope,” alluding perhaps to the lingering finish of the drink. This study allowed Lutyens to “build up a kind of relationship between these parameters and the taste sensations.”

An algorithm was designed to sort the headset EEG signals into either meditation or attention inputs, each with its own distinct pattern. “The meditation signals are less dense and move slower, and the attention ones move faster and are more closely packed,” explains Lutyens.

The creation of the visual programming was also informed by the Bouba/Kiki effect, discovered by German psychologist Wolfgang Köhler. The effect demonstrated the brain’s association between words and shapes.

‘Although the cocktail comes with a color, that isn’t necessarily the color of the taste it may have.’

“On that basis”, says Lutyens, “we associated a sharp taste, like chili, with more angular shapes than a smooth taste.”

Color, however, has remained the one confusing factor in the visualization of taste. Lutyens says: “It’s a difficult one because although the cocktail comes with a color, that isn’t necessarily the color of the taste it may have. Red, for example, is often associated with strawberry but also with chili. Color become less important to decipher a flavor than form, and the density of patterns and speed of movement when it came to writing the code.”

Obviously, the images created on the night of the installation will depend on the participants’ brain activity, cocktails and perhaps how many of them they’ve had. However, Lutyens’ artistic impressions of what kind of visuals will be produced can be seen in Wired UK’s gallery.